Enthusiastic Reader > Recent Status Updates

p 193 - "If all of our actions and judgments stemmed from reflected, consciously endorsed beliefs and values then not only would the world be a better place, but this book would be several pages shorter."

p 192 - "Sociologist Barbara Rothman asked a group of mothers to describe the movements of their fetuses... among the women who didn't know the sex... there was no particular pattern to the way that (what turned out to be) male and female babies were described. But women who knew the sex of their unborn baby described the movements of sons and daughters differently."

p 191 - "As it happens, I can match anecdote with counter anecdote. Both of my sons, as toddlers, behaved in much the same way... They too, despite being male, tucked trucks into pretend beds and, yes, called them Daddy, Mommy, and Baby."

p 190 - "Parents see their young children behaving in stereotypically boyish or girlish ways and, as Kane puts it, "assume that only something immutable could intervene between their gender-neutral efforts and the gendered outcome they witness."" But of course, there's the possibility that their gender-neutral EFFORTS are not actually gender-neutral. Plus there's the effects of society at large.

p 183 - "immigrants from countries like Romania, Russia, and the Ukraine... keep their end up when it comes to participating in these prestigious competitions and programs... These women are A HUNDRED TIMES MORE LIKELY to make it into the math faculty of Harvard, MIT... than their native-born white counterparts. They do every bit as well as white males, relative to their numbers in the population."

p 181 - "the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth... gives the quantitative section of the ... (SAT) to kids who, theoretically, are way too young to take it. Children who score at least 700 (on a 200 to 800 scale) are defined as "highly gifted." In the early 1908s, highly gifted boys identified by the SMPY outnumbered girls 13 to 1. By 2005, this ratio had plummeted to 2.8 to 1."

p 180 - "several very large-scale studies have collected data that offer tests of the Greater Male Variability hypothesis by investigating whether males are inevitably more variable in math performance, and always outnumber females at the high end of ability. The answer, in children at least, is no."

p 177 - "thinking, learning, sensing can all change neural structure directly."

p 174 - "I discovered my son's kindergarten teacher reading a book that claimed that his brain was incapable of forging the connection between emotion and language." See, essentialism always seems to lend itself toward encouraging students to pursue their strengths; but shouldn't there be just as much of an effort into improving their weaknesses?

p 174 - "neuroscientists who work in the area of drug dependency talk about the efforts they go to to prevent simplification or distortion of their findings by the media... it is a sensitive area, and "brain facts" about dependency can change people's attitudes and feelings about a particular social group."

This parallels what Carol Dweck talks about in comparing "fixed" and "growth" mindsets.

p 173 - "women who had just read an essay arguing that there are genetically caused sex differences in mathematical ability performed substantially worse on a GRE-like test, compared with women who read that experiential factors explain sex differences... [this] may stem from people's assumption that genetically based differences are more profound and immutable than differences that arise from social factors."

p 171 - "In response to an article in the New York Times that claimed from an fMRI study that "a mother's impulse to love and protect her child appears to be hard-wired into her brain" one neuro-curmudgeon put out a ple to "take experience and learning seriously. Just because you see a response [in the brain] - you don't get to claim it's hard-wired." "

p 169 - "neuroscience easily outranks psychology in the implicit hierarchy of "scientificness.""

I feel like I'm WELL over halfway through this thing. Like it doesn't give me credit for the introduction, because it's set in roman numerals. And it counts the notes and the bibliography, because they have regular numbers. So I'm more than halfway through the reading part; the author's note ends on 244.

153 - “Nor is the topic of gender difference by any means the only area in which over interpretation can occur.”

152 - “neurons can be specialized for different jobs in different contexts… For example, a particular population of neurons… may, at different times, represent both identity (‘Whose face is it?’) and expression (‘Is it happy or sad?’) What these neurons are doing depends both on what sort of information is being fed in, and also what sort of information is being fed back from higher regions in the processing chain.”

151 - “Inferring a psychological state from brain activity (like ‘The amygdala was activated so that means our participants were fearful’) is known as reverse inference, and as any neuroimager will tell you, it is fraught with peril.” Really? ‘FRAUGHT WITH PERIL’? Someone escort this author to a divan and bring the smelling salts!

150 - “their “findings suggest that men tend to modulate their reaction to stimuli, and engage in analysis and association, whereas women tend to draw more on primary emotional reference.” (By this they mean that only women find others’ emotions innately arousing.)” Uh, no, that’s NOT what that means. Fine is definitely misrepresenting the researchers’ conclusions.

149 - “Does this complicated-sounding list of brain activations tell us something interesting about gender difference in emotional experience? The researchers, like Pinker, certainly think so.” Fine seems to be implying that because the differences in brain activity are in regions that have specific names that most people aren’t familiar with, that this is a reason to dismiss these differences.

What I’m wondering at this point is whether Fine is (accurately) representing the conclusions drawn by the researchers she’s citing. This section feels rather straw-mannish. But I don’t know whether that’s because she’s misrepresenting the researchers, or whether it’s because the researchers (or others reporting them) overstate their results.

The occasional snark is sometimes quite cutting. Would you like salt or lemon juice on your paper cut? And there’s no way that “Mrs. Gur” rather than “Dr. Raquel” is accidental; that’s a deliberate choice. I think I would enjoy a conversation with Ms. /Dr. Fine.

p 139 "[Gur] says, “I can’t at the same time worry about whether this is in the microwave and that is in the skillet. When I do, something will burn.” Presumably, in that sad pile of cinders also lie the smoldering ashes of Mrs. [sic] Gur’s hopes of someone else ever being in charge of the meals.” (continued)

p 139 - “The implications of this difference for mental juggling may explain why Gur’s wife and collaborator, Dr. Raquel Our, must take on the main burden of quickly putting together a meal for a hungry family."

138 - “Nonexistent sex differences in language lateralization, mediated by nonexistent sex differences in corpus callous structure, are widely believed to explain nonexistent sex differences in language skills.” Fine is REALLY overstating her case; there ARE demonstrated sex differences in language skills; what has not been shown is that there is an entirely-biological, non-environmental reason for those differences.

135 - “because imaging is so expensive, a small number of participants is the rule rather than the exception, and small neuroimaging studies may be especially unreliable, because nuisance variables (like breathing rate and caffeine intake, or even menstrual cycle in women) can dramatically change the imaging signal”

I regularly come across articles that conclude that the factor the researchers were studying did not have a statistically significant effect. It would be interesting to explore article acceptance rates and reasons given for rejection. Also, to what extent do they differ across disciplines?

Additionally, I question the accuracy of Hines’s assertion that “it is more interesting to find a difference than to find no difference.” This is not supported in Fine’s book, and it is not consistent with what I have seen in my own research reviews.

(continued) “This contributes to the so-called file-drawer phenomenon, whereby studies that DO find sex differences get published, but those that don’t languish unpublished and unseen in a researcher’s file drawer.” I find myself curious about this “phenomenon” and can’t help wondering who coined the term, and how many of these studies Fine has languishing in her own drawers. ;)

134 - “Because it is more interesting to find a difference than to find no difference, the 19 failures observe a difference between men and women go unreported, whereas the 1 in 20 finding of a difference is likely to be published.” (Hines, qtd.) (continued)